The wide use of computing systems has led to the increased use of electronic documents. Many documents are structured documents and have a number of sections or fragments that may be referenced, viewed, or modified separately. As an illustrative example, this patent disclosure could be formatted as a structured, electronic document with a number of sections including the background, description, claims, etc. Many electronic documents are formatted or structured using a markup language such as the extensible markup language (XML).
There is an increasing need to be able to efficiently access, modify, search and otherwise manipulate these structured documents and the information contained in them. One solution is to store structured documents in relational databases based on the different tags associated with the document. Unfortunately, such a storage technique does not allow multiple users to access and modify portions of a stored document in parallel.
Accordingly, improved techniques for storing and maintaining structured documents are needed. It would be desirable to provide systems and methods for storing structured documents in a database system. It would further be desirable to provide systems and methods allowing multiple users to modify and update structured documents.